The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
To create an ecosystem that connects leaders of all kinds – industry, community, student, educational, civic, investment and entrepreneurial – to help overcome Omnichannel Retail barriers through exclusive, insight-rich content.
The Doing Business in Bentonville Podcast
Ep. 91 - How to Win in Retail Media: Insights from Chris Sheldon
Dive into the world of e-commerce with Chris Sheldon, a veteran in retail media, as he explores the complexities of omnichannel strategies and global expansion. This episode covers crucial insights from his work at Podia, focusing on how businesses can successfully navigate the shifting landscape of online retail. Shelton discusses the necessity for a customer-centric approach, unpacking the evolution of omnichannel and its impact on how brands connect with consumers across various platforms.
Listeners will learn practical strategies for global market entry and the unique challenges businesses face when expanding beyond their home shores. Shelton sheds light on Podean’s innovative solutions that enable brands to thrive in diverse regions, utilizing expert insights to tailor their marketing efforts for each specific market. He further delves into the growing significance of social commerce, emphasizing the need for brands to adapt their strategies in response to the shifting consumer trust landscape, heavily influenced by social media and influencers.
As the episode wraps up, Shelton teases an exciting mini-series focused on omnichannel journeys, promising to equip retailers with essential tools for navigating the evolving dynamics of the industry. Tune in now to gain actionable insights that can help propel your business toward success in the ever-changing world of retail. Don't forget to subscribe, share, and leave us a review!
Well, hello everyone and welcome to Doing Business in Bentonville. I'm Andy Wilson, I'm the host today and I want to welcome back my guest today, chris Shelton. Welcome, thank you, andy, for having me. Glad to be back.
Speaker 1:Well, we have a lot to talk about today and we're going to get straight into this and you know, one of the things that we're going to do is going to talk about Chris's new role now and get into the great company he's with today. He's going to tell us all about it and all of what they do around the world. It's a major global company and I can't wait to get into that. But we're going to chat a moment really about Omnichannel for him. You know, omnichannel is continually changing and moving and improving and, as you know, I mean what Omnichannel does is it helps us really focus around customer-centric approach to retail today and it's awesome and I'd love to hear some thoughts you have overall Omnichannel. And then I want to get into this great company that you're now working with and all the things you do around the world. But let's just chat a minute. What are your thoughts as we get into this discussion on Omnichannel?
Speaker 2:Yeah, omnichannel is a fascinating one because I feel like we've moved the goalpost on what constituted Omnichannel about seven times in the seven years that I've worked in Omnichannel.
Speaker 2:When it first came out, it was about, you know, maybe you were doing buy online, pick up in store, and if you were checking that singular box, if you had like a iPhone photo of your product on walmartcom that was, you were an Omnichannel supplier and that was like you're crushing it.
Speaker 2:Maybe you were one of those like really you know new suppliers who was testing out Amazon for the first time. The definition was very loose and very like eh, it was a bad stand back then, and what we've seen is that every year on year, folks have added a requirement to what means Omnichannel the fulfillment options that you're providing, the effort you're putting into your content, your product design. Hell, even today, some people are actually doing online specific products to meet their customers where they need. And even more so, omnichannel has gone beyond Omnichannel at a specific retailer. It now means every retailer that a supplier is now selling for, and even for us at Podia, it now means Omnichannel globally, and so I feel like next year I'm going to start talking about how to sell products in space, but at this point we've now reached where Omnichannel is coupling the globe and covering all the media options that are within that and all the ways that it's fulfilled.
Speaker 1:So really I have no idea what we're going to say next year about Omnichannel, but I'm hoping that the growth slows down a little bit so we can calm down there. But you know it was at the beginning of this journey and you know, and this journey, a quite just, really smooth transition between all these interactive points. And now what I've noticed is these points are cleaning up, they're getting smoother. It's not as bumpy as it was. It's still bumpy a bit, but not like it was when we had some big potholes early on seven years ago.
Speaker 1:Like you said, I love your point, but what we're going to do today, we're going to really get into what Chris's company does and how they can really help and navigate you through this whole transition to create the smooth transition, if you will. So let's talk about your company. Okay, Tell me about the company, how long you've been there and why you chose this company, but then let's get into the details. Yeah, absolutely. So welcome back. As I said, I'm glad you're back and I'm going to make a list later in the show about Chris and some of the things he's going to be doing with us and doing business in Bentonville.
Speaker 2:But tell us about your company. Yeah, so Podian is a full service global marketplace agency, which is I've talked every buzzword into that little bit of definition but what that simply means is that we help brands who actually need help selling their products across all of their marketplaces, whether that's in America, here at Walmart, target, kroger, sam's Club you name it all the way to retailers like Asda in the UK or all the way out into Shopee in APAC. We do everything from content, media design, retail operations, logistics basically everything you need to actually do to sell your product online across the globe. Specifically, we're a remote first agency, so we're able to service the globe because we have team online across the globe. Specifically, we're a remote first agency, so we're able to service the globe because we have team members across the globe. We have managing directors in every single major region across the globe and those teams are subject matter experts on how to sell a product in Australia versus how to sell a product in Brazil or Argentina, and that knowledge and expertise allows us to take these brands who are very interested in Glenn Gubble but don't want to invest the resources and footprint into having teams in every single one of those major nations that I just listed, to get more done, get it done faster and get it done better.
Speaker 2:Padeon also operates a small practice called Livecraft. Livecraft is a social commerce practice, so social commerce has been super buzzy in the industry these days. But really what the end of the day is that people are buying more from influencers. They're looking for people they trust and they're transacting that way. We've seen that TikTok shop is becoming one of the largest retailers in the U? S with the product that it moves Um and the reason it's moving. That is just people trust the folks on uh on TikTok. They trust the folks on Instagram. I trust those folks on Facebook. So Livecraft helps those brands engage with those mechanisms that feel pretty scary and it's really hard to keep up with Gen Z I'm right on the cusp of being Gen Z and even myself I struggle to keep up with how they talk, how they say and how they want to buy things, and so we help connect and bridge those things to executives who are trying to understand how they can tap into the social market.
Speaker 2:But that's Padilla and Ed's core and I'll back into that last question you asked about. You know why did I come here? I've been here 60 days now, so drinking from a fire hose at Padilla. But really it came down to two things.
Speaker 2:One, our founders, mark and Trav, are incredible. They've got a vision for an agency that operates and feels and looks different than other agencies. We take care of our people, we build a flexible work culture that empowers folks to be the best version of themselves, and we actually mean that. And that was an incredible proposition to come join a company where everyone I talked to and how long they had been there was extremely happy.
Speaker 2:You go look at the senior leadership of Odeon. Almost every single one of them has been there since the beginning and has been promoted from director now to VP, now to the C-suite. It's a company that cares about its people, invests in its people and, spoiler alert, we're in the agency space and so the only thing that actually matters is people, and so if we don't have great people, we don't empower them, we don't take care of them, we don't have an agency at the end of the day, and that vision really drew me. That and I'm watching the global marketplace world expand, get more complex, seem like the place to be, and I saw a complete need for what Podium was going to be building in the future Wow.
Speaker 1:You know it's exciting and when you had messaged me and told me about your change and I'll begin to research Podium and look at that and get into the details of that it just seems such a great fit for you, just knowing you and talking to you, and we've had many conversations about Omnichannel, and so I'm excited for you and I know what we want to do today is really have Chris to get in to the details, if you will and how as a business, that you can overcome these complexities a bit. We talked about early on about the bumpy road and the omni-channel, but I will tell you, chris, I think you just need to really begin and get into some of the things that you do as a company, and we can start with this end-to-end marketplace management if you like, and then let's just navigate through this. Okay, yeah, absolutely so, about your services and all Okay, yeah, so at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so about your services at all.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, so at the end of the day, we've watched the world become some more complex place. What you needed to operate on e-comm five years ago is not what you need today. The number of problems are infinitely larger than the number of teams that you would need. We estimate, generally speaking, that there are 24 different subject matter experts that put D&N employees in order for a single brand to sell globally. Now, if you were a CPG making an investment to sell globally, that is a lot of money that you are investing to employ the staff to set up legal entities to sell in those places and to actually get the work done. And, frankly, you don't actually need 24 full-time people to get that work done. You may need 10 hours of somebody who understands logistics in Brazil and 20 hours of somebody to design your content. You do not need somebody full-time for 12 months of the year to help do those things.
Speaker 2:So what Podian is able to do is that we have a stable of folks who are incredibly talented, understand those areas and are subject matter experts in the specific parts that they need, whether it's marketing, content, design or retail ops and we can give those services, in a bucket of retainer hours to our clients, say 100, 200, 300 hours a month that they can access and use as they need to service their global, the service their brands as they sell across the globe.
Speaker 2:And that's really important because we don't want to just sell retail ops, because one month you may have a whole host of problems and we may be battling tons of third party sellers and dealing with variation authority and really struggling to get items set up, and the next month those problems may be completely gone and our team and our flexibility of what we're able to do is to then take those hours and focus on something else. We can put more effort into media, put more effort into your planning for big deal days, for prime day, things like that, and so that model really allows us to support really flexibly and meet brands where they are with what they need and also help brands from very small selling $5 million in product all the way up to brands selling $500 million in product.
Speaker 1:So you don't have a one-size-fits-all here. That's what I like about your company. As I've done my research is that you really collaborate closely with your customer or client and able to tailor what they need Is that correct Exactly and, I'd say, one of the things that Bodine at its core.
Speaker 2:We are an agency that's designed to move units of product off of digital shelves right.
Speaker 2:That is the number one impetus that we get hired by our clients to do, and we take great pride in taking clients who sell $5 million in product to selling $25 million in product.
Speaker 2:We are not doing that, we are not succeeding as an agency, and so it is our job and what we staff to be able to do is to deliver that end result.
Speaker 2:We want to be great folks in design, we want to have great folks who do retail media really well, but at the end of the day, if our clients' businesses aren't growing, we aren't doing our job, and so I think that's been a plague that's been affecting the agency world for the past couple of years is that we've all been very focused on doing the big shiny retail media thing really really well, but no one is asking did your brand actually grow when you spent that $20 million last year? Did it actually drive your business results? We've become very divorced from those two things being together, and so by having all of those teams under one focus, under one leadership, to actually go say everything we do, whether it's designing content, optimizing your PDPs or building advertising campaigns. All of that, the end goal is to drive your business and if you don't do that, you're not setting up those brands for success.
Speaker 1:Right, absolutely Well, let's, let's take it and let's just let's talk about this. Your about your marketplace consulting, so you have a product. How does that work If they want to contact you? What would you do with a customer if you will? Yeah, so walk us through that so that our viewers can get a glimpse of what would happen in the process.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'll zoom out briefly. Just talk about Padilla Consulting and why it existed. Mark and Travis, our founders, have been doing consulting for brands for basically since they started. It was actually almost became what Padilla is today was supposed to be consulting, and over time they pivoted towards the marketplace agency world. But they've always been doing this, and so for me, what it came to is that I saw and as I was looking at this opportunity, I saw a crisis of execution, and what I mean by that is that we had all of these agencies and I was guilty. I worked for them, I did this too.
Speaker 2:There were so many newfangled toys and platforms and e-commerce systems to learn that we stopped asking the strategic questions. We stopped trying to figure out hey, why actually? Why, I know I had these. You know, a great example is when Omnichannel first started, most suppliers just took their entire catalog and put it online. Right, that makes sense. Should we have done that? Why did we do that? Was it? You know, you knew that you're going to take certain cost increases for fees and shipping and logistics, but we didn't. We just kind of did it because it was the thing to do was to move to e-com, and the same thing as you move and move product from Walmart to Amazon. Plenty of suppliers here in Bentonville have copied their catalogs from Walmart straight to Amazon and haven't really asked the question why did we do that? Was that the right decision? Is my catalog from five years ago serving me today in the same way that I designed it to and years ago serving me today in the same way that I designed it to?
Speaker 2:And the agency partners that they're working with don't have an interest in really helping them solve those questions. And so what we realized at Podian was that brands are hungry for those big strategic questions and the answers that come with them. And so we launched Perdian Consulting to help solve those big one-off problems that an agency really isn't paid to solve in the first place. Right, if you're one of the big six and you've got a giant advertising contract, it's not your job to go tell Kellogg's you know which size of cereal they should be selling on Amazon. That's really not a problem that you're asked with solving. But that problem, if you solve it and help them do their catalog architecture correctly, could be a tens of millions of dollars successful project if you optimize that correctly, whether it's based on freight, packaging size or breakage rates that come with that, and so what we're trying to do is help answer those really hard strategic questions that brands are asking with a service offering that doesn't come from suits with MBAs.
Speaker 2:Just because you went to Harvard does not mean you understand e-commerce. If you've not logged into RetailLink, if you've not been in Amazon Vendor Central, you simply don't understand. And no amount of those kind of certifications in those big consulting firms can convince me that they have the expertise needed to solve these questions, and a lot of our friends in the CPG world use those consultants, they use MBB, they use McKinsey Bain, they use those folks to solve these problems, but they're paying somebody two years out of college to learn these things instead of hiring experts that are that know the field, have been there, have helped brands actually succeed, and so our objective at BDM Consulting is to build an offering that's stronger, based in actual, real-world expertise, and actually is driving towards that last goal that I talked about, which is to actually drive sales for the business at the end of the day.
Speaker 1:I think that's excellent. I mean, I think you really do get it. You get into the details in your consulting, your market consulting process. It sounds wonderful. Now you know the thing that you said to earlier. Let's go back to for a moment. You talked about your. It's a global company, and the wonderful thing about Omnichannel is you can really begin to sell your products globally. So talk about your global expansion.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it is extremely common right now. Right, amazon has gotten harder and harder to sell on. Walmart is getting harder and harder to sell on. Right, you're kind of entering this, this Roman gladiator arena. You're fighting against extremely smart, professional sellers. If you're not battling against PepsiCo and these huge suppliers, you're also battling against some of Amazon's most sophisticated resellers, like PharmaPak. One of the biggest Amazon sellers in the world is a reseller. It's incredibly talented at selling product and so when you're selling on the Amazon in the US, you are not to mention 1.25 million Amazon sellers entered Amazon this past year, in 2024.
Speaker 2:So not only is it already competitive, but more and more and more folks are getting into the market. What that means is that you've got to be really good to really succeed on Amazon and you're going to fight really hard for very small growth. And so what our brands are coming to us asking is hey, I'm tired of fighting in the US. It's just not as profitable anymore. Fees are increasing. I want to go global, and the first thing they do is they pull up the list of GDPs of countries and they go hey, it looks like Amazon is huge in the UK and Germany. I guess I'll just expand there. And, like I said back to you know it looks like Amazon is huge in the UK and Germany. Like, I guess I'll just expand there.
Speaker 2:And like I said back to before, it's a crisis of strategy.
Speaker 2:You cannot just pull up eMarketer and find the size of the market and tell me that that's where your brand should expand. If you don't have one, the local expertise you'll miss. A very simple one is that in Germany they're very focused on buying on e-com platforms German brands. If you go in thinking that just because the German home care and home furniture market is a $300 million opportunity on Amazon, but what you don't realize is that that market is owned by 94% of German sellers themselves, you're never going to actually hit the goals that you're trying to achieve.
Speaker 2:If you enter the market that way, or if you don't consider the logistics costs to get a product from the US to London, you may not realize that the pack you sell in the US for $15, actually with VAT and everything else is going to be $22 in the UK. And where does your pricing and positioning sit now that you're $7 more expensive? These are like the baby questions that start getting asked and when you really start looking. You have to start answering some bigger questions about where should I expand and how should I expand.
Speaker 1:Right, well, so that's wonderful. So you've talked about the consulting, you talked about what it's going to take, and you can take people to the global expansion of their business, which is phenomenal. So talk about now what we call a marketplace media. You know, as we said at the top of the show, is that early on, in the only channel, it it was just a couple, just a couple things. Now, this whole channel experience, what you're getting is this how broad this is and and it's so important on the media side now. So how do you, how do you do that?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's a. It's certainly a challenging environment in retail media today. Uh, there are a bajillion platforms. We spend a lot of money with amazon, a lot of of money with Walmart, and part of that is just one having an expert team. One of our largest staffs within our cohort of subject matter experts is in retail media.
Speaker 2:But if you're going to launch products for the first time, you have to have really dang good advertising strategy. If you're going to go from zero to 10,000 units in a month, right, and so part of that is understanding one. You know, what we benefit from is that we've launched thousands of products, if not tens of thousands of products, globally, so we understand what it takes to go from zero to 90 days and to sell zero products on day one and to sell 10,000 units in month three. And that's a really important part of our advertising strategy is building it to actually grow over time and grow quickly, right. We all wish we could sell into our CFOs and our VPs of sales. Don't worry, we're going to grow this very slowly over 12 months. It's going to be really cost effective. We're going to take our time.
Speaker 2:I don't think I've ever been in a room with an executive who is signing off on taking 12 months to do a very slow growth plan? Right? The expectation is always speed and rapid market share growth. Right? No one is really going to sign off on? Okay, we can take our time. It works out. It works out.
Speaker 2:If it doesn't, it doesn't. You have to be laser focused on how you succeed, how you play around 10 polls and then, more importantly, how you change advertising right, build advertising creative in the US. You then have to change that to be German, to be Spanish all of these different languages and also still be culturally relevant. The way that you market to somebody in the UK is going to be different than the way you market to somebody in Slovenia, and so you have to have that cultural context which Podian has, because we have teams all the way across the globe. And I think another important part is that we're a great partner of Amazon's In 2023, we won their Global Expansion Award because of the great work we do in helping brands go overseas, and that deep partnership allows us to understand their new ad products, how they're working together and how we can partner, and that's really important. If you're not aware of what's available to you in the first place, you're not going to succeed.
Speaker 1:Congratulations on that. That's a wonderful win for Amazon and that gives you so much credibility also. Now you have something that I was reading about. It's called RPM. Okay, I've found that fascinating a bit. Can you explain that process?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, like you said, as I said, omnichannel has become a bajillion things. Yeah, so has all the data pipelines that exist around the world for everything we I mean you just look at how many places you now have to log in just for Walmart right, there's I just got renamed so there's Centilla, there's RetailLink, there's Vendor Central for Amazon, seller Central for Amazon. Within each of those, there are like nine or 10 different places where you need to log in and grab data. So if all you want to do is just get the data from all those platforms and then put it in one place, you could task an analyst on your team with 20 hours a week of just going in and hitting download on those Excel sheets and merging them Right.
Speaker 2:And so what RPM does at its core is take all of those disparate data sets and puts them into one place. So, like I said at the top of the show, all we care about the end of the day is driving business results, and so if we can't map retail media efforts back to driving sales, what are we doing? And so part of that is using RPM to connect advertising and sales data together so that we can map those two things together. That's a home inbuilt tool that Podian has that all of our clients get access to. It's an incredibly important part of essentially building a synergy around everyone looking at the same thing, everyone marching to the same drum Great.
Speaker 1:I like it, I like how you're into the details, I like it, I like, I like, I like how you're into the details. You know, and and as we again, as we're navigating through this complexity of Omnichannel, and then your solutions that you have created, you've created some other solutions also around retail operations and content and creativity and social commerce. So let's you want to talk about, let's talk about some of those Cause. I think they're excellent at what you have, what you've come up with.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so one. As I said before, when you go global, you take the complexity scale and you turn that knob to 11. Essentially is what happens, right? Yes, Every different Amazon likes to pretend that they are standardized across all marketplaces. And even even just if you go across the northern border to Canada, Walmart and Walmart Canada they share the same name, they share the same branding, but even then, how they operate, how the retail media is powered, how the commerce is powered, how the website looks even, is different if I just go above the northern border. Right, that's correct.
Speaker 2:And so what we at Vodian have to do is essentially help brands, which are typically very US-centric in most cases, understand how they can take a bunch of really great creative work that they did for the US it's built on consumer insights and information on a US customer and then go build content and PDPs that sell in every major nation around the world. That's a daunting task. One to even understand the cultural context of all of those Two. We can't use Google Translate to translate the languages for all of those. You have to do really good translation. No one is going to buy your product if you're mistranslating something into bread by accident when you're trying to sell socks right. That's just not going to be a way that works, and so our content design teams are experts at taking that kind of content and expanding it to all the marketplaces that you're offering. We also do design, so we will do everything from helping you repackage and rebuild. If you realize that your US centric brand just is not going to sell well in Spain and Portugal, but you are really focused on that market, our design teams will help you redesign your packaging, redesign your online profile and PDPs so that it fits with that market and you can kind of reinvent the way you sell. This is a really important thing where, like where, you're not going to get brand recognition once you're moving to farther out, especially overseas, if you're a smaller brand in the US, or if, for a customer, this is the first time they're going to be hearing about it.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes it's a chance to test or reinvent your actual product and design, and so that's a core part of what we offer, and we also offer audits for those kinds of things. So we'll look at your content and look at it across the globe and see how you stack up. We have lots of great partners who you know. They had a great year. Last year they grew 20, 30%, but they're looking around going how did I, how could I have gotten to 25? How could I have gotten to 35%? Growth and understanding how they can improve as a critical part of developing that content as well. It's an ever evolving battle, Unfortunately. You're always going to be improving that content, learning new things and developing. And then I'll jump to that Lifecraft side.
Speaker 2:We have some amazing partnerships with some very big companies who are partnering with us to figure out social commerce. Anyone were to come on this podcast and tell you, Andy, that they've cracked social commerce they're lying to you. Everyone is just riding the bull and hoping that they can hang on. That's currently what's occurring. But social commerce has been a great place for us to play. Our brands are really invested in figuring out how to play there.
Speaker 2:And just to quickly define in social commerce is everything that happens with an influencer, a micro-influencer, to drive product sales right. It's all of those relations together. Hypothetically, if I told you to go buy some P&G razors today, that would be social commerce. It's not a very measurable form of social commerce and my reach is one-to-one, but it is a version of it and that scales all the way up to some of the biggest YouTubers and TikTokers in the world who, to tens of millions of fans, can say I love dude wipes and I want you to go buy that product today.
Speaker 2:And that's a really difficult dynamic for brands to understand, right? They oftentimes we've had many cases where brands have come to us and gone. We just sold 7 million units across the globe and we can't figure out why we're out of stock nationwide and we don't know why. And after a week of research we find that a TikTok post went viral and somebody was talking about their product and it wiped their store across the globe and branches aren't ready for that kind of demand, they aren't ready to capitalize on those kinds of things, and so we at Livecraft are really focused on developing those, giving brands the tools to respond, to react, be proactive instead of reactive in a space that they've largely been kind of trying to follow the coattails of these influencers, right, right, yeah, now I know you do a lot of work with Amazon and let's talk Amazon for a moment, okay, because we all know Amazon.
Speaker 1:We know they do a very good job on a lot of things and you know they have, I think, amazon. You tell me, but tell me the work you're doing at Amazon, and then let's just talk about how you feel opportunities with Amazon or whatever, and then we'll chat about that for a moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I'll say first, being here in Bentonville, I'm a Walmart guy through and through.
Speaker 1:Yeah right.
Speaker 2:There's a bit of blue somewhere in this blood. I love us. Yeah, and I always feel like a bit of a traitor Anytime I talk about it.
Speaker 1:I'm like looking around, it was hard for me to ask you that question.
Speaker 2:I know let's acknowledge the elephant in the room and I'll say this about Walmart first, and I'll say this about Podium we are a marketplace company. If today Walmart launched a stronger, more vibrant marketplace than it has and in a year from now was bigger than Amazon, our focus would be on Walmart. We do not care that Amazon is. There's no loyalty to it beyond that. It is the market leader in marketplaces right now. The moment that Amazon or Shopee or any other marketplace takes that focus or takes that growth and starts to really develop something, podium will help you figure out how to sell there. That is our focus at the end of the day. And so right now, amazon has kind of a death grip on a lot of very specific marketplaces. Walmart's doing great work to grow. Their fiscal earnings just came out. They're doing a great job growing marketplace. It's just David and Goliath which is a weird thing to say about Walmart being David in this case but they are fighting a huge battle and an uphill battle to grow there.
Speaker 2:But regarding our Amazon partnership essentially, and why Amazon loves to work with us, I think in general, and why our partners love working with us, is that one we handle everything right. It's very hard for an Amazon vendor rep to recommend an agency if they can't handle end to end, and that's a big part of what we offer is every problem that you can run into on Amazon. We have somebody who's run into it. We have a Palo every week with our team where we just share the crazy problems that have happened on Amazon when a three-piece seller has stolen your buy box and is all of a sudden selling product at six times the price or has bought all your product on a liquidation sale at Costco and you're now trying to deal with that. We talk about all those things. We've experienced all the problems that Amazon has, and Amazon is an experience of learning right. Every day there will be a new problem, a new way that something is broken, in the same way that you're solving problems at Walmart.
Speaker 2:But it's about being aware and learning from that and at the scale that we are, we're able to have experience with those issues.
Speaker 2:Rarely are we experiencing an issue with a client for the first time and if we are, we're trying to replicate that so it never happens again for our other clientele, and that's a big part of working with them. I think the other big part is when it comes down to the advertising side of things. We've gotten really smart with how we do that. Our entire staff at Podium is Amazon certified and Amazon DSP, their search products, all of those things and that's a time and investment that we've made to make sure that our teams know what they're talking about at all times. There are a lot of folks who have brought retail media folks from Google and Meta and other products and this is their first or second year and they're spending tens of millions of brands dollars without really the expertise to back that up and so we've made a big effort to both train our teams and be invested in keeping up with every last trend that's happening in that space.
Speaker 1:Well, it's great. Thank you for sharing that to the smaller retailer today. If you will, you cover all of that perspective, as you said at the very beginning, from a small amount to a large amount, right? And so I think we just want to make sure our viewers understand that you can work at all those size platforms, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:It's a core thing for us that if all you sell on today is walmartcom and that's all you do, we can support you. We have experts who live here, like me, folks who can support you in that business. And the day that you make a sale in the Sam's club, we can support you there as well. And the day that you finally get that global ambition and get that spark in you to try and go sell products somewhere else, we have all the resources available to get you across the pond to wherever you want to go do business. And that's our big promise is that we're going to service every single part of the market and we'll have the staff to grow with you should you need to.
Speaker 1:And I think that's a good summary that you, in what you said, you have the staff to grow with you, and I think you know, and I have a lot of smaller retailers that come in and talk and I give them opportunity as well as I do the large ones, and I think it's very comforting to know, if I'm a small retailer today, that they can rest with assurance that you can help guide them through this process and then help them grow. And you've done a great job explaining many of those facets, how you've done that. So I want to summarize this and then I want to move on to something exciting that I want to announce about you. But how would you summarize or any additional comments you'd like to make?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll just make one last plug for Padilla and Consulting. If you have issues that you're trying to solve or you've got something that's been the sticky wicket in your business for the past couple of months, you don't have the resources, you don't have the staff and you just need something solved quickly, we are here to solve those big strategic questions that you have. If you are interested in global expansion we've run over 50 of those analyses for very large and very successful brands who are now crushing it across the globe and if you are interested in that, that's a service that we can launch for you today. You can go to putdncom slash consulting and you can reach out to us. That contact box goes straight to my inbox, so go say hello and we'll get you sorted. And if you are looking for an agency, of course reach out to us as well. Putdncom slash solutions you can take a look at everything that we've got there when it comes to how we support brands and how we help them grow. But at the end of the day, right, find me on LinkedIn, linkedincom Chris slash and Chris J Sheldon.
Speaker 2:I'm here for questions, right? If you just got something you're curious about? You heard something on the podcast today that you want to talk about. I'm more than happy to deep dive with you on that. It's an exciting time to be in e-comm, and not everything has to be for money, right. We're here to take care of each other, to do great work, to share great work, and so if you've just got questions, just want to chat, want to get coffee, find me there as well. That's wonderful.
Speaker 1:Great, chris. Okay, now, the thing that I mentioned at the top of the show is that we're going to do some other things with Chris, and I'm really excited to announce today that we're going to be bringing Chris back at Doing Business in Bentonville and we've created what we're called a mini series, if you will, and Chris is going to be coming back on with some subject matter experts and he's going to be doing even a deeper dive into this omnichannel journey I'll call it and he's going to really educate us on the different and really different facets of this whole incredible universe called omnichannel. And I'm so excited about what's happening in retail. I started in brick and mortar and I will tell you every day I'm excited about what's going on in retail. And so, chris, thank you for coming back and doing this. I'm really excited and we'll be announcing soon Chris and I will be this series and we'll be sharing the Chris and I will be this series and we'll be sharing the content and the journey. And so, chris, thank you. Thank you so much for having me, andy. It was great. Yeah, it's so great, and I look forward to this relationship and this journey, and you know the thing I do in business in Bentonville.
Speaker 1:We're all about OmniChannel. We're here to really help simplify OmniChannel, if you will, but also to educate you, our retailers, our viewers, on how you can grow your business, how you can understand this process of flow that's happening around us and the change that's happening almost daily, and you need experts to help you with that, and that's exactly what Chris and his team is going to do. Yeah, you need an army, and we have one. I love it. I love it. Well, chris Shelton, it's always great to see you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for coming on. Best to you and your new journey. Thank you so much, andy. Okay, all right For you joining us. Thank you so much. I want to thank you all so you can reach out to LinkedIn. I'm Andy Wilson at LinkedIn. Reach out to me and you can message me on questions. The people in the back room told me this morning that we're now over 2,000 views a day, and then we're also now in view to 90 countries, and that's because of you. So, thank you. We really appreciate that you are listening and watching doing business in Bentonville. Have a wonderful day, everyone. Goodbye. Thank you again, chris. Thank you.